Six Lives of Fankle the Cat Read online

  “What a way to die,” said Sander Black, wonderingly. “There’s worse ways, I suppose.” The public telephone box was on the roadside, not twenty yards away. Sander didn’t like telephones or television, but he managed to tell what he had seen to the hospital in Kirkwall. “Not that it’ll do the poor old creature any good,” he said to the doctor at the other end of the line. “He’s as stiff as a salt skate by this time.”

  The helicopter droned along the horizon. It hung over the loch, dropped, went here and there. It drew up into itself what was left of old Andrew Gray, a spark of life in an ice cage. It went in a great slow arc in the direction of Kirkwall and the hospital.

  Three days later the old man was sitting up in bed and smoking his pipe. “I told them,” he said. “I got tired of telling them. The snow and the ice nowadays are nothing like what they were when I was a boy. In them days you could have held the agricultural show on that loch, any day from December to February.”

  It was dark when those who had gone to visit old Andrew in the hospital returned. As they passed Inquoy, going gingerly because of the increasingly dangerous road surface – all green and black ice – they saw two diamonds gleaming in the window.

  Fankle was keeping ward and vigil.

  ***

  The island, after six days, was sheathed in ice armour. The snowman in the schoolyard was no longer the jolly white flocculent teddy bear of the first three days. There was a grimness about him. He began to look like a stout cruel knight arming himself for an unjust war. If a stone was thrown at him, he rang like iron. All at once, it seemed, the children turned away from him. They discovered an old sport that they had almost forgotten, so green the winters had been for five years past: sledging. Half-a-dozen sledges were unearthed from barns and outhouses. The nights sussurated and rang, and were lyrical with distant laughter, as the island children hurtled on their sledges down the slope of the hill.

  “Fankle,” whispered Jenny on the second night of the sledges, “I’m going out to sledge. You see, the snow will soon be gone, and then we won’t be able to sledge for a whole year, maybe more. I’ll see you when I come back. I’ll warm some milk for you.”

  Fankle paid no attention. There had never been such haughtiness or disdain in the croft of Inquoy. Fankle had fallen out with Jenny. He refused to acknowledge her presence. He sat gazing into the cheerful fire, and blinked now and then. He was his own cat. Let him be left alone. He could live quite happily by himself.

  But he did not sit beside the fire all night. When the rosy-faced children dragged their sledges home from the hill, there, at the croft window of Inquoy, twin diamonds blazed. Fankle was contemplating, for yet another night, the mystery of snow.

  ***

  The snow vanished overnight. When the children were in bed – and they needed no stories or cocoa to make them sleep, those nights – the rain came, in sheets and torrents. For hour after black hour it rained, a warm persistent downpour. Every roof and window in the island drummed and throbbed – the gutters sang little songs all night – the pools along the road plashed.

  When first light came, about eight o’clock in the morning, the island had shed its winter coat, except for a ragged patch or two of grey lace along the stone walls, and on the upper slope of the hill. And still the rain nagged and nagged at the last tissue of snow.

  The children trooped, draggled, to school. The snowman had suffered a mighty defeat. He was a ruin, he was unrecognizable, he was a shrunken shapeless lump stuck about with buttons and pieces of coal and other items from the kingdom of man. Barney Bell took the pipe from the mess, shook it dry, and put it in his pocket.

  “Perhaps,” said Mr Tindall the school-master, “we’ll be able to get some work done now.”

  ***

  That night, Fankle decided to be friendly again. He condescended to speak. (Mr and Mrs Thomson were out, visiting their neighbours for an hour.) “I won’t deny it,” said Fankle. “I was very hurt, Jenny. I would not have believed it – you, my best friend, deserting me for a snowman, a thing that’s here today and gone tomorrow. Let me tell you this, Jenny, if that snow had gone on for a few days more, you wouldn’t have had your Fankle. It would have been the end of me. You’ve no idea how much I suffered!”

  “Poor Fankle,” said Jenny, and stroked him with all the tenderness she had in her. “Dear sweet Fankle!”

  “Nasty white useless stuff,” said Fankle. “Thank goodness it’s gone. I can tell you, Jenny, I was very worried for a day or two.”

  “What’s so worrying about a snowfall?” said Jenny.

  “Dear me,” said Fankle, “human beings have short memories. I never cease being amazed. Perhaps you’ve never heard of the Ice Age.”

  “Of course I have,” said Jenny. “Thousands and thousands of years ago.”

  Fankle licked his paw. He blinked at the peatflame. At last he turned sombre eyes on Jenny.

  “There was more than one Ice Age,” he said, “there were several. There will be another Ice Age sometime soon, when we least expect it. When I saw that first snowflake ten days ago I thought to myself, This is it. Here it comes ... But I said nothing. I didn’t want to frighten you. I thought, Poor innocent things, enjoying themselves on the edge of destruction, why should I disenchant them? “

  “You weren’t a very good prophet of doom,” said Jenny, “for the snow came and went like a million white blossoms, didn’t it? It was very beautiful while it lasted.”

  “Some winter,” said Fankle, “the snow will come and it won’t go away in a hurry. There’ll be no springs or summers or autumns for ten thousand years. There’ll be no silly children, either, dancing round an idiotic-looking white lump.”

  Jenny let her imagination drift into that bleak awful time. She shivered, as if a first breath of it was on her flesh.

  “The odds are,” said Fankle, “you won’t see it in your time, Jenny. Now that we’re friends again, and have the house to ourselves, I’ll tell you a story.”

  “Goody gumdrops,” cried Jenny, and lifted Fankle in her arms, and rubbed her hair in the fur between his imperious ears.

  “Put me down!” said Fankle. “I refuse to tell the story in such an undignified posture ...”

  Four-square on the rug again, Fankle said, “There will be no snow in this story, I’m glad to say, except for a few silver scars on the mountain tops. Think of China. Think of an orphan girl beside the river, called Bat-ye, pulling reeds from the river bed. Think of the young lonely Emperor in his jade palace, the splendid rolling garden with grottos and fountains, green silk pavilions, a dragon’s cave. I remember it all so well, Jenny. Are you listening?”

  Poor River Girl

  Bat-ye was a poor girl. Her father was a fisherman, but he was dead.

  Bat-ye grew up to be tall and beautiful. Her hands were like flowers.

  Bat-ye could say in a dry time, “Cloud, be good to the earth.” And the rain would come; as it always does at last, anyway.

  Bat-ye could say, when the floods rose, “River, keep to your own house.” Then the poor people whose thresholds and goats had been drowned clapped their hands and laughed. (The waters would have gone down, sooner or later, whether Bat-ye had spoken to the elements or not.)

  Bat-ye said, “I am poor. Gold, come to my hands. But Bat-ye remained poor and hungry, for three more years. Then Bat-ye understood that a selfish wish was never answered; at least, not at once; and never in a way expected.

  One day Bat-ye was pulling reeds from the river to make baskets. She sold baskets, and flowers, and little delicate grass cages with butterflies and grasshoppers in them, in the villages along the river shore. A man passed by on a horse, going along the river track. He said, “Girl, you have beautiful hands.”

  Bat-ye bowed her head.

  The horseman said, “I am the Emperor’s Minister of Commerce. I live a thousand miles away, in a fine house just outside the capital. Last winter the old silk-weaver in my house died. My wife said, ‘When you are visiting
the villages along the river, and the mountain villages, enquire after a good weaver of silk.’ I think I have found such a person.”

  Bat-ye answered that she had never done such a thing as weave silk. She could only make baskets and grass cages.

  “With such beautiful hands,” said the civil servant, “you could weave silk better than anyone in the four kingdoms. Come.”

  Bat-ye dropped her bundle of reeds. They floated down the river. She sat on the horse behind the Minister of Commerce. She saw soon that there were other horsemen, armed, riding behind. They shouted to each other, “The minister has found a beautiful girl! ...” “This river girl is a better prize than all the taxes he has gathered from the delta ...” “She is the sweetest thing our eyes have seen in ten thousand miles ...”

  All the way to the capital, the great minister asked only one question, “Girl, what is your name?”

  She answered in such a low voice that it might have been two rain drops falling on a blade of grass: “Bat-ye.”

  “You will have a new name in my house,” said the Minister of Commerce. (Bat-ye means poor river girl.)

  At last they came to the minister’s house. It had two courtyards, a fountain, twelve outside flights of stairs, a pet dragon in a cave, a winepress, an orchestra of flutes, and a hundred servants.

  Bat-ye was shown the looms, and the hanks of silk, and the breeding silkworms. She put her hands among the silk. Her hands were like swans fishing in bright water.

  After a week, Bat-ye began to make beautiful silk.

  The minister’s wife decided that her new name should be Girl of Tulips.

  ***

  Girl of Tulips was lonely in the palace. She did not understand the language of the people – only a word here and there. She missed the fishing folk. She missed the buyers and sellers at the river markets. She missed the cry of the waterbird.

  She said, “I am lonely. I long for a friend.”

  The minister’s wife would have been her friend. But she had been sick for a year. She lay on her bed all the time. Her cheeks were red patches. Her arms were sticks. Not the lightest daintiest food would remain in her stomach. One day Girl of Tulips poached a little fish that she found swimming in the garden pool. She prepared the fish with milk and a little wine. She brought it on a blue dish to the minister’s wife. The minister’s wife ate the meal and said, “That was delicious food. It lies kindly on my stomach.”

  Later she said, “Your hands are kind, Girl of Tulips. Take the silver from my forehead. I am drowning in sweat.”

  At midnight she said, “You are my dear friend, Girl of Tulips.”

  An hour after midnight the Minister of Commerce, two doctors, and seven women entered the room where the woman lay. They stood silent round her bed.

  At dawn the minister’s wife died. “Close her eyes, Girl of Tulips,” said the minister.

  The dead woman lay on her bed like a girl asleep under a tree.

  The seven women put on black masks. They danced slowly.

  Then grief broke out throughout the palace, like floods and like tempest and like thunder. The cook wept into her pot of soup.

  Girl of Tulips did not weep. She had got the friend she asked for, but only for an hour.

  ***

  Beautiful sheets of silk, beautiful rolls of silk, issued from the looms. The hands of the girl went serenely among the silk like swans on a brimming river.

  One night she wept: “I have no one I can love. Alas!”

  The very next morning she felt against her leg, while she sat at the loom, a stroke and a brush of exquisite softness. She thought for a moment that life had entered one of the hanks of silk. She looked down. A small black cat was rubbing against her shin-bone. It was the loveliest kitten she had ever seen. “You will stay with me in my room, black cat,” said Girl of Tulips. “You will have milk of unicorns to drink. You will have peacocks’ brains to eat. You will sleep on a drift of flower petals.” (That was imagination and poetry, of course. All she could give the kitten was bits of half-chewed chicken and ordinary milk.)

  ***

  At the end of the funeral, the shimmering body fell through its great cage of flames. The flames leapt higher, roared louder. When at last the pyre was all ashes, multitudinous grey whispering in the emerald casket at the heart of the pyre was a strewment of finer ashes. The dust of the woman was given to the four winds.

  Household voices cried, “Farewell, dear lady...” “Go joyfully into the House of the Elements...” “Your pleasant deeds and words are with us always.” Girl of Tulips said, “Go, friend.”

  When she looked up, she saw that the Minister of Commerce, the widower, her lord and master, was standing before her. He looked at her for a butterfly-time with sad beseeching eyes.

  Her eyes were in the dust.

  He left her alone in the garden.

  Girl of Tulips said, idly, “I have lost a friend. Do you hear that, cat? I don’t know what name to give you, cat. Cat, I need love in this poor life of mine. Let love come, soon. Cat, the lord of this house loves me, but I do not love him. Love is cruel and sweet. Perhaps my lord will send me back to the river when he knows for sure that I cannot love him. I will be poor again. I will marry a fisherman and gut fish. Cat, you have the wisest look I have ever seen on a creature. Perhaps I will call you Midnight. Cat, I am sick with longing.”

  ***

  The minister did not send his silk-weaver back to the river. Instead, he contrived in every way to make life richer for her. He gave her the most beautiful room in the house, looking towards the mountain with silver scars at its summit. Every morning a box of delicious confectionery was brought to the weaving shop by a servant. She was given two servants who attended to all her needs and wants. They robed and disrobed her. They handed her down the steps into her bath of perfumed water. They surrounded her with flowers. Musicians played while she slept. They would have fed her from golden plates if she had let them.

  Occasionally, on one of the flights of stairs, or in the garden, Girl of Tulips and the minister would come face to face. One cold face, one face that was a looking glass of joy, confusion, beseeching, pain, hopelessness.

  Every time, Girl of Tulips shook her head.

  The minister would bow, turn, and go about his business.

  Then, at her ankle, the caress of black silk. The cat with no name was never far from his mistress.

  It could not go on forever, that strange wooing. One morning Girl of Tulips came into the weaving chamber. She found red words pinned to the loom. “The lord the Minister of Commerce requests of Girl of Tulips the happy and well-handed mistress of the looms (once a poor river girl) that she become his lady and the mistress of all this broad and beauteous and fruitful estate. I have written this with the blood of my heart. Answer soon. Answer sweetly.” “Love is cruel,” said Girl of Tulips to her cat. She wept. Then she seized a piece of charcoal and wrote NO in large reckless letters across the page. She went out into the garden then. She did not cry any more. She sat still, with the black cat in her lap, cold as a statue.

  She did not sit for long. Three men from the minister’s bodyguard approached through the flowers. They had ropes in their hands. They seized her without a word.

  I forgot to say that the minister had, on his estate, apart from the flutes, the dragon grotto, fountain, and winepress, an underground dungeon. There, in the blackness, Girl of Tulips was imprisioned. The walls dripped dampness. Occasionally a chain rattled in the distance. She would be wakened from her sleep by a thin lost shriek.

  Her only comfort was the little black engine of delight that trembled upon her shoulder.

  Time had no meaning in that dungeon. What did her unloved lover mean to do with her? She thought, after a seventh pang of hunger had gone through her, that he must have sentenced her to death by starvation.

  A rat stirred in the corner of her cell. She cried out in terror. The black cat flowed from her shoulder, and the rat withdrew into its hole.

  T
he terrible place intruded into her dreams. A white shape lay stretched on the floor, bound and staked. A figure in a dark robe bent over the helpless one. “Love!” it commanded. “Love! Love!” “No,” whispered the victim.

  The torturer nodded. Half-naked men with torches and knives approached. Their faces were blank ...

  When Girl of Tulips woke, sweating, from that dream, the sweetest moment she had ever experienced was the song of the black cat on her shoulder, and his eyes like diamonds in the gloom.

  Before she dropped off to sleep again, she heard a prolonged thrilling echo. A fanfare of silver trumpets was being sounded from the gate above. There was a muted pulse of drums. Some great event was about to happen.

  Girl of Tulips whispered, “What is love? ...” Then she was folded softly, in the poppy of sleep.

  ***

  The Emperor had arrived. That was the reason for the ceremonial music at the gate. The Emperor and his retinue had arrived, having given only an hour’s notice. The Emperor had decided to make a leisurely progress through his four kingdoms. At every great house, beginning with his Minister of Commerce, he would have to be expensively entertained.